Thursday, February 24, 2011

Chula Vista Police Chief David Bejarano and former business partner Art Moreno reached a settlement agreement in their dispute over the operation of a security firm.

"He (Art) bought out my share of the business the first week of August," Bejarano said.

The two were co-owners of Presidential Security Services Inc., located in Chula Vista.

Earlier this year Moreno accused Bejarano of writing fraudulent checks on the company's account.

Bejarano countered by threatening to pursue a defamation lawsuit against Moreno.

In 2008, Bejarano was appointed president of PSSI through a shareholder's agreement and was issued 49 percent of stock shares in the corporation.

He resigned after being sworn in as Chula Vista's police chief in August 2009.

City policy prohibits officers from working for or owning a private security firm in Chula Vista.

When Moreno became president of the company after Bejarano resigned, he took steps to deny Bejarano access to corporate bank accounts. According to a complaint he filed with the city, Moreno said Bejarano continued to write checks from the company's account.

"This is simply a civil suit between two business partners, for whatever reason he's bitter and disgruntled," Bejarano said at the time...

Sweetwater Union High School District has boosted its legal services budget by $800,000.

Superintendent Jesus Gandara asked trustees last week to approve an $800,000 increase to the legal services budget from the district’s reserve as the South County school system is looking to close a $24 million shortfall in next year’s budget.

The rationale for the increase was tied to gender-equality litigation the district is working to resolve.

The district’s insurance policy on the case covered up to $850,000 in attorneys fees, a limit which already has been exceeded by $300,000. A measure asking for the increase stated the money would have gone into the legal services fund to “replenish the legal services account and accommodate future invoices.”

That wasn’t specific enough for trustees, who called for an amendment to the item specifying that the money be expended solely on the Title IX case. No part of the money may be used toward other legal fees or firms.

Wednesday, February 09, 2011

To me, this sounds typical of just about any human enterprise, and precisely reminiscent of some of CVESD's actions. Who's in charge at CVESD, at the CIA and elsewhere? Very likely NOT the best person for the job.

In December 2003, security forces boarded a bus in Macedonia and snatched a German citizen named Khaled el-Masri. For the next five months, el-Masri was a ghost. Only a select group of CIA officers knew he had been whisked to a secret prison for interrogation in Afghanistan.

But he was the wrong guy.

A hard-charging CIA analyst had pushed the agency into one of the biggest diplomatic embarrassments of the U.S. war on terrorism. Yet despite recommendations by an internal review, the analyst was never punished. In fact, she has risen to one of the premier jobs in the CIA's Counterterrorism Center, helping lead President Barack Obama's efforts to disrupt al-Qaida.

In the years since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, officers who committed serious mistakes that left people wrongly imprisoned or even dead have received only minor admonishments or no punishment at all, an Associated Press investigation has revealed. The botched el-Masri case is but one example of a CIA accountability process that even some within the agency say is unpredictable and inconsistent.

Though Obama has sought to put the CIA's interrogation program behind him, the result of a decade of haphazard accountability is that many officers who made significant missteps are now the senior managers fighting the president's spy wars.

The AP investigation of the CIA's actions revealed a disciplinary system that takes years to make decisions, hands down reprimands inconsistently and is viewed inside the agency as prone to favoritism and manipulation. When people are disciplined, the punishment seems to roll downhill, sparing senior managers even when they were directly involved in operations that go awry.

Two officers involved in the death of a prisoner in Afghanistan, for instance, received no discipline and have advanced into Middle East leadership positions. Other officers were punished after participating in a mock execution in Poland and playing a role in the death of a prisoner in Iraq. Those officers retired, then rejoined the intelligence community as contractors.

Some lawmakers were so concerned about the lack of accountability that last year they created a new inspector general position with broad authority to investigate missteps in the CIA or anywhere else in the intelligence community.

"There are occasions when people ought to be fired," former Sen. Kit Bond said in November as he completed his tenure as the top Republican on the Senate Intelligence Committee. "Someone who made a huge error ought not to be working at the agency. We've seen instance after instance where there hasn't been accountability."...